


A Single Chord in the Dark

by chucksauce



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Grief, M/M, Post S3, Team Sussex, eventual retirementlock, finding hope, it's quiet uptown, johnlock feels with a side of hamiltears, learning how to count blessings, learning how to let go, so many angst, suicide ideation, sweet christ this is probs the most pretentious thing i have ever written pls forgive me okay, tw for off-screen infant death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-11-24
Packaged: 2018-05-03 03:55:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5275571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chucksauce/pseuds/chucksauce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surviving grief comes on John slower than a creeping season, the draw of the ocean, the invention of the right words when the chasm is too wide and the pain too deep. Sherlock is a soft voice at the end of the phone line, the weight of a hand in the garden, the beginning of numerous blessings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Single Chord in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> So I was supposed to be working on [A Wound Unheal'd](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3317819), but then I was listening to the second act in Hamilton, and ["It's Quiet Uptown"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrsmUzqweBI) hooked me right around the sternum and dragged me sideways. I tried to fight it, but this happened.

AGAINST ALL ODDS, it is not a bullet that kills John Watson. It is not old age, or sickness, or his own hand. It is the death of a child that was never his.

Not biologically, he’s fairly certain. Who could be sure, when She had lied about everything else?

It’s the act of childbirth that does it. Fetal distress. A cacophony of monitor bleeps and nurses and doctors going quiet as they usher him from the room and set to work.

 

 

THE DISTANT ROAR of the sea wakes him, same as every morning. His first week here, he considered diving in, swimming down. The freezing onslaught as waves crash over him, his thick clothing dragging him, the burn of brine in nose and throat and eyes. Nothing but the gurgling press of water in the ears, muffling everything, harder and quieter as he kicks, diving deeper.

He stays the hell away from the water. Refuses to even bathe.

The small cottage that Sherlock has lent him, an old family property languishing seaside in Sussex, is blessedly foreign. John needs that these days.

 

 

THEY HAD LET him hold her, for just a little while. He held her as tight as he could, her still frame little more than the heft of a bag of sugar. The muscles of his throat clenched around broken glass and he didn’t breathe, he’s certain, the entire time. His eyes burned; the salt of tears and the brine of the ocean are maybe not so different.

 

 

HE PUSHES THE thought away. It was nothing he would have ever imagined, even with his fucked up track record. Who _could_?

 

 

SHERLOCK’S BREATHING FILLS the silence, distant. Near-inaudible gusts, the wind on the sea, on the far end of a phone line. London is miles and years and lifetimes ago. Neither of them knows how to speak anymore. Not to one another, not to anyone. This is more than John can bear. It is more than he deserves, this last grace he’s been given. He is certain it cannot last--nothing ever does, not the way it’s supposed to.

 

 

THE EARTH CONTINUES to rotate, each day bringing him a little closer to the sun, though the change is more gradual than a flower unfolding. If it were quantifiable in the moment-to-moment existence which consumes him these days, it would be akin to counting every last blade of grass, every last atom in one of the clusters of lavender that grow in the back garden. There are days _\--the ones where he remembers the weight of that small thing in his arms, the way the waffle-weave blanket pink and white insulated his heat from her cooling body, the limp curl of fragile fingers--_ he wishes to an indifferent god he had the courage to count each blade of grass.

If he had Sherlock’s temerity, he could overwrite that data with the scent of earth, the texture of another cloth--not that fucking blanket. He could memorize the amount in parts-per-millionth of brine in a single cubic inch of sea-water, and maybe that would erase the number of beeps before the final heart monitor flatline.

He does not understand how the days get warmer, how spring encroaches. It is unfathomable.

 

 

HE SPENDS HOURS in the back garden. It is somewhat safer than the sea--which still calls in the distance, its roar a siren-song beckoning him in whispers and a seductively crooked finger.

 

 

IT HAPPENS TO be the first day of spring when the garden is no longer enough to drown out that siren call. He has taken to bathing again, to shaving, though the bags under his eyes remain bruise-tender and dark. He still swallows glass each time he remembers, but at this point he’s discovered Scotch will make it go down somewhat smoother.

 

 

THE CRUX OF equinox is not enough, not yet, to dispel the winter chill that huddles in night-time puddles, gripping the wind and pushing it along the midnight streets. The nearby village only has one high street, if it could even be called as much.

John hasn’t intended to walk this far--not in the dark, not with such little sleep and so much Scotch.

But here he is, the world fuzzy around the edges, his belly too-warm and his extremities too-cold. There is no such thing as equilibrium--not thermally in his body, not gravitationally as he sways down the pavement, not in the weight of things given versus things taken. The universe is blinder than he feels on his best days.

His is a slow solo waltz, where the only spin is in his head as he moves closer to his destination, the small all-night store at the far end of town.

It is near-silent. Even the sea has stilled, as far as he can tell.

The only noise is the discordant echo of a piano, bleeding through the thin walls and old lead windows of a warm-windowed house. If John focuses he can make out the shadow of the upright in the window. The sound of it makes him wonder for a moment at the person just on the other side--of the wall, of the piano--who taps one note in a pensive rhythm.

It is a single chord in the dark, a constant reminder, a recurrent thought.

That’s what he has chosen, isn’t it?

 _Ella would have something cryptic to say,_ he thinks.

The sound of it hollows him out, even all the glass he’s swallowed since January.

It clears his head in a way he absolutely loathes, and nothing stops the ache that presses from inside his ribs, which are excoriated and brittle in the wake of being gutted clean. The pain will shatter him from inside out, he knows this.

And for the first time in three, four months, he craves the comfort of another body, warm and solid against his as they lay tangled in bed--soft and slightly floral. He misses the Mary he met, two lifetimes ago before--well, Before. From before _January_ and before Sherlock returned, heralding so many uncovered truths that did nothing but rip equilibrium from him once more, rob him yet again of a good thing he’d worked so hard to grasp.

Worse, he craves an older comfort, another body, warm and solid against his as they sat shoulder to shoulder in cabs and on couches--all angles and the subtle warmth of cedar and lavender, the hitch of a smile so rare it felt like winning a prize at the fair. He misses the Sherlock he met, countless lifetimes ago--and isn’t that such a twisted brand of selfish? Scrabbling to bottle lightning, that.

That, too, is its own recurrent thought.

 

 

ON HIS WAY home he walks past a small chapel, an ancient heap of stone and coloured glass leaning away from the street, banked in the shadow of a massive evergreen. There is a cross on the heavy wooden door.

He remembers a heavy wooden door, pushed aside in the beginning of a life he never got to have, only got to start, a small stack of freeze-framed photos.

The two people he loved best on either side, a flurry of petals suspended mid-air.

It hadn’t taken long, had it, for that to be ripped away from him.

Then his brain hijacks the memory, contorts it until it’s more of a nightmare:

_John and Mary, pressed shoulder to shoulder, their hands cradling a tiny body no heavier than a bag of sugar while a priest sprinkles droplets of water on her forehead. The thrash of impossibly small limbs, frail fingers. Wrapping her in a soft pink waffle-weave blanket for the trip home._

John has never been a religious man. When they had talked of it, neither he nor Mary had any intention of raising a child in church. But the image knocks him sideways all the same.

He finds himself praying yet again to an indifferent god for silence, for the pain to just stop.

 

 

WHEN HE GETS home--well, back to the cottage--his finger slips as he plugs in his phone. It unlocks. His finger slips again and again until he has the screen pressed to his ear, warming against his air-chilled skin, and a familiar ring pulsing in the pitch black.

“John?”

This is how it always starts, isn’t it?

John calls when the ache gets to be too much, when the siren song is too loud, when the answers to his prayers are not forthcoming. It’s not a remedy, nor even a palliative. It’s merely the auto-function of an organism instinctually delaying the inevitable just a little longer.

The sea is calling him, and there is only so long he can stall. He knows this.

It is odd to discover he is not afraid.

So rather than answer the sea, he calls Sherlock.

“John?”

The first few times John called, unable to speak for the way the glass wedged itself in his throat, each subsequent repetition of his name _\--Sherlock always did hate repeating himself, didn’t he?--_ would raise in pitch, in frequency. John could hear the way Sherlock would hide his concern less and less, or else consciously show it more and more--

That never used to happen Before.

But tonight, after so many times, Sherlock only repeats his name softly. Sherlock understands, he thinks, that he needs this reminder that his name exists, that he exists.

“I--” Sherlock falters.

This is new. Sherlock has never deviated from their script, the scrape and whoosh of resting breath, punctuated occasionally with a name like a prayer in the dark.

Not a prayer. A benediction.

A pardon for any number of sins.

As ever, John is silent. He pushes away the unimaginable, the call of the sea, the memory of frail fingers or of soft wife or of a hard-won smile crooked in the corner of a mouth unaccustomed.

Since Sherlock has gone off-script, so can John.

“It’s quiet in Sussex. You’d hate it here.”

Pause.

“John?”

“Hm.”

Silence. Words do not touch the brittle line tethering them, do not bridge the chasm between who they were and where they find themselves.

 

 

THE ROAR OF an engine wakes him the following dawn, unlike any other morning since he’s come. He does not have to look out the window or check his phone. He knows.

 

 

AT THIS RATE neither of them will ever bother going back to Baker Street. For John that flat feels as alien as his primary school or the idea that at one point he’d never met Sherlock--relic facts from a life too far removed. But here in Sussex, in this goddamned cottage, rhythm returns even though silence reigns.

 

 

SHERLOCK JOINS HIM in the garden these days. Together they silently consider the bees that have crept out of their dormancy, just like the summer that has stolen in as slowly as a flower unfurling. Sometimes John wonders, a play on an old memory, if Sherlock would ever be tempted count all the blades of grass--it is really unimaginable that anyone would bother.

Just like the idea that anyone would bother with him--but that’s a thought just true enough he must push it away before it knocks him out. It will not take much, even now, for him to fall apart.

 

 

TOGETHER THEY WALK the length of the town. Words creep in, like bees or like summer, easier in the dark. Surprisingly, Sherlock reminds John how to smile.

Sherlock offers the weight and warmth of pressing shoulder to shoulder in a late-night diner, all angles and the subtle scent of cedar and lavender. Sherlock offers John the chance to grasp at small smiles crooked in the corners of his own mouth, unaccustomed.

“Your hair has gone grey,” Sherlock says one evening, hunched over steaming chips. The acrid tang of vinegar lingers, a sharp stab in the olfactory centres of John’s brain.

And it draws a _laugh_ from John--who is as startled about that as Sherlock seems to be. “Can you imagine?”

 

 

EACH DAY THE sea recedes a little further until one day John realises he can no longer hear its roar. He is surprised to find he is not afraid--not afraid of its call or that he will succumb to it. It doesn’t call him anymore.

 

 

AT THE END of summer, they are curled on the sofa, a movie offering light and noise after a particularly memory-laden day. For the first time in longer than he cares to recall, John does not crave the comfort of a body tangled with his, because it is now a need sated--it is surprising, however, to find this is the case when he wakes the next morning, limbs slotted between Sherlock’s. He’s just shy of falling off the narrow sofa, which clearly was not built for two grown men.

_It really isn’t that surprising._

How could he ever offer his thanks to Sherlock? For the use of the cottage, for repeating his name in the dark just to keep John from swimming down further?

John’s throat is tight, but not with glass. It’s more like a baked potato, firm and steaming, searing the flesh of his esophagus.

John does not deserve Sherlock--not in this lifetime, not as who they are even now. He never has, but has taken every last offering.

He will hold on tighter. It will be enough.

 

 

THAT AFTERNOON they are standing in the garden. Honeybees weave in lazy waltzes between lavender bobbing in the breeze, poppies drooping with the weight of their brilliant hues, a hundred other flowers all a riot that has crept in slower than the passing of a season, untraceable.

Sherlock is by John’s side.

John takes his hand.

Sherlock swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing like the poppies. “Look at where we are,” he whispers. “Look at where we started.”

The bees buzz. The ocean doesn’t even whisper. The only memory in his head is the single-note strike of a piano in the dregs of night, the slow drawl of a violin lifetimes ago. The memory of being hollowed out clean, brittle. And yet.

The warm press of humid August, the weight of Sherlock’s hand in his--these are enough to push away that unimaginable pain.

Finally John responds sotto voce, unable to give voice to everything in his middle. “I know I don’t deserve you, Sherlock--”

But Sherlock turns, looks at him, squeezing his hand slightly--as if he is all too aware how fragile this exact moment is. “Hear me out--that would be enough.”

John cannot breathe, he does not know how, not when the August air is so thick with heat and water vapour, not when the summer sun collects the breeze and holds it for ransom. As much as he _wants_ , he has learned not to hope, even now.

Sherlock swallows again, his eyes dancing along the stalks of lavender, lingering on the grass like he’s counting every blade. “I don’t pretend to know the challenges we’re facing--I know there’s no replacing what you’ve lost. And you need time. Just let me stay here by your side. That would be enough.”

John cannot swallow for the press of his own heart in his throat, pulsing thick and heavy. All he can do is nod, offer an affirmative squeeze of Sherlock’s hand.

 

 

YEARS PASS AND they still spend hours in the garden, they still walk the length of the town, talking. Their hair has turned grey and John has discovered finally that the sea holds no threat (its roar was always in his head); that his heart and his bones are stronger than the circumstances that break them, heaps of rock and coloured glass though those are. He has learned how to live with the memory of holding a small weight in a soft pink blanket, and how to push away the darkness that will excoriate his insides if he lets it.

With Sherlock pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, they waltz slowly into their twilight years. John finally has the time--and the temerity--to count his blessings, as numerous as blades of grass.

**Author's Note:**

> (PS if you haven't heard about Hamilton--where the hell have you been? GET ON THAT TRAIN.)
> 
> # # # # #
> 
> I really enjoy making friends with strangers on the internet. Come by and say hi!
> 
>   * [**My Fandom Tumblr**](http://chucksauce.tumblr.com) for all manner of crying about fictional characters and laughing at shitposts
>   * **[My Fic Rec Blog](http://spoilersauce.tumblr.com)** , if you're into multifandom recs.
>   * **[Under-London](http://under-london.com/)** , the original serialized novel I'm working on for cheap-as-free!
>   * **[My Twitter](http://twitter.com/chucksauce221)** , where I basically live when I'm not writing...
> 



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